Re: decompress tgz

[Danie Roux <droux@tuks.co.za>]

On Thu, Sep 13, 2001 at 11:04:07PM +0530, shyamk@eth.net wrote:
> What is tgz and how do you decompress it ?
> 
> I undertand for gzip it is gunzip , for tar it i tar xvf 
> 
> Please help 
> (shyamk@eth.net)
> Shyam
 
It's a tar gzipped file. Tar does not compress files, it only
concatenates them together. gzip does the actual compressing. This is
the Unix philosophy: Let a tool do one thing and do it well.

So the long way to decompress it is:

gunzip file.tgz | tar xvf -

Meaning decompress the file, pipe it to tar which then reads from
standard input and unpack that stream.

The short way is

tar zxvf file.tar.gz

For bzip2 files (newer tar):

tar jxvf file.tar.bz2

Install unp, a very nice script that unpacks basically anything without
any commandline options.

apt-get install unp

-- 
Danie Roux *shuffle* Adore Unix